Partecipation as competitive advantage

In Are Blogs the New Resumes?

the author Daniel Scocco arguments that bloggers certainly have an edge over job seekers that do not publish one and he says that it is so because the employee will have more informations on the candidate from his blog and his public presence than just from his resume or interviews.
Those informations will be even more true as they will probably not be mediated and influenced by the will to find a job (that sometimes makes people act a bit).

In the end hiring a blogger is a lower risk proposition because you have more
information and a better idea of how they are going to perform.

I find this idea can be applyed in most other settings where you would otherwise have to take a decision based on asymmetric knowledge that is when you may not have all the informations as the other part (as in many business transactions for instance). Using knowledge from the web (blogs and other social media) may mitigate the risk on both sides and thus may give an advantage to the more open actors over those enterprises that are more close to the outside: prospect clients will prefer doing business with someone from which they know what to expect rather than not!

Openness and partecipation to the social web should thus be considered a competitive advantage by the enterprises.

technorati tags:business, blogs